In the military context, this understanding is embodied in the concepts of force protection and force health protection. In applying these concepts, the military aims to preserve its force’s fighting strength by protecting individual servicemen and women against the threat of enemy action and by taking steps to minimize the effect of hazards on unit effectiveness, readiness, and morale. The unprecedented potential for multiple terrorist attacks drives home the need for comparable thinking in the response community. Sustainability becomes key: Incidents must be managed with an eye on ensuring the readiness of response organizations to meet future challenges.

Major Disasters Present Special Challenges for Safety Management

Fortunately, disasters of the magnitude of the September 11 events are rare. Usually emergency responders confront incidents on a comparatively small scale that can be handled on a local level and pose more limited safety risks. But a major disaster presents a significant challenge to a locality, a state, a region, and sometimes even a nation. Responding to such an incident tests the capacity of responding organizations and can place large numbers of emergency responders in harm’s way. Protecting the safety of responders in those situations is much more difficult.

In contrast to the types of incidents that emergency responders normally face, major disasters share a number of characteristics that create unique difficulties for response organizations.¹

Large Number of People Affected, Injured, or Killed
While small-scale emergencies involve a few individuals or small groups of people, major disasters severely affect large numbers of citizens across communities, cities, or entire regions. The Northridge earthquake caused more than 60 fatalities and 9,000 injuries and displaced 17,000 to 18,000 people from their homes [Stratton et al. 1996]. The attack on the World Trade Center claimed the lives of more than 2,800 individuals and put many thousands more at risk [“The Numbers” 2002].

Large Geographic Scale
Most emergency incidents involve only a single building or other well-defined site. Major disasters, however, often extend over very large areas. In 1992, Hurricane Andrew left a trail of devastation that extended over 1,000 square miles [Lewis 1993]. Responders to the Oklahoma City bombing confronted a rubble pile more than 35 feet deep made up of approximately one-third of the federal building structure [Oklahoma Department of Civil Emergency Management 2000].

Prolonged Duration
Average emergency response operations are relatively short, lasting only minutes or hours from first responders’ arrival on scene to completion of response actions [Study Interviews].² In contrast, activities in major disasters can stretch into days, weeks, or even months. Although the total repair and clean up after Hurricane Andrew lasted much longer, the U.S. military relief operation lasted for 50 days [Higham and Donnelly 1992]. In New York City after September 11, 2001, the response was not officially completed until eight months after the attack [Barry 2002].

Multiple, Highly Varied Hazards
Whereas common emergencies usually present emergency responders with a limited number of risks, major disasters involve multiple hazards that can vary widely in nature. The World Trade Center site, for example, exposed response workers to a complex mixture of physical and respiratory perils [Lioy and Gochfeld 2002]. Responders to the Northridge earthquake confronted active fires, collapsing buildings, and hazardous materials [Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) 1994a]. Because of this wide variety, few responders will have experience with everything they might encounter in the aftermath of a major disaster.

Wide Range of Needed Capabilities
Major disasters require supplementary response capabilities not routinely maintained by local response organizations.³ Many natural disasters and major terrorist incidents require extensive rubble removal and management operations that local response organizations are not equipped to carry out. FEMA-sponsored urban search and rescue teams were needed to respond to both the Northridge earthquake and the September 11 attacks. Such requirements frequently turn the response effort after a major disaster into a multiagency operation that can span all levels of government, nongovernmental organizations, and the private sector.⁴

Influx of Convergent Volunteers and Supplies
In contrast with smaller emergencies generally handled by a local response organization, major disasters often attract large numbers of independent, or “convergent,” volunteers. These volunteers may be members of other response organizations that come to a disaster site spontaneously or ordinary citizens who come out of a desire to help [Maniscalco and Christen 2001].⁵ Likewise, a major disaster also frequently prompts individuals and organizations to send large quantities of food and other supplies. Hurricane Andrew was a prominent example, where the influx of people and supplies was so overwhelming that responders referred to it as “the disaster after the disaster” [Study Interviews].

Damage to Infrastructures
While localized disasters leave infrastructures vital to effective emergency response intact, major disasters can damage or destroy them. Hurricane Andrew severely dam-aged the local transportation infrastructure, with road signs destroyed and major roads blocked. The Northridge earthquake caused numerous ruptures in water mains and citywide power outages.

Direct Effects on Responder Organizations
Unlike routine incidents, major disasters can directly affect the operational capacity of response organizations. The emergency responders lost in the World Trade Center collapse are one tragic example. Another occurred in Hurricane Andrew where the homes of at least 128 police officers were damaged or destroyed. Many of the officers reported for duty not knowing what had happened to their families [Taylor 1992].

Responder Safety Management Is Risk Management

The inherently hazardous nature of any emergency situation necessitates that safety be approached from a risk management perspective. Rather than eliminating risk altogether, response managers aim to shield responders from hazards to the greatest extent possible. When making decisions, the level of risk in any given action should be weighed against the potential benefit.⁶ This process of safety management can be broken down into three central components, as shown in Figure 1.1:⁷

• gathering information about the nature of the situation, the responders at the scene, and the hazards involved
• analyzing response options and potential protective measures and making decisions
• taking action to implement safety decisions, reduce hazards, or provide health protection to responders.

These three activities take place in a continuous cycle until the response effort comes to a close.⁸ As part of this continuous management effort, safety managers constantly reexamine and evaluate their efforts to protect responders as operations at an incident scene continue.⁹

Figure 1.1 Response Safety Management Cycle

RAND MG170-1.1

In the course of their routine activities, organizations develop standard approaches for carrying out these functions. But safety management during the response to a major disaster is a far larger and more complex undertaking. Safety management practices that are well developed and effective for standard response activities will very likely be insufficient. In short, the highly demanding and unfamiliar environment after a major disaster makes it difficult, or even impossible, for individual responder organizations to effectively perform the three functions of the safety management cycle.

Major disasters create substantial hurdles on the organizational level as well. For example, the multiagency nature of responses to major disasters makes safety management significantly more complex. In an effort of this magnitude, where many different organizations unfamiliar with each other’s operating practices are working side by side, a new set of secondary hazards can arise from the response operation itself. These secondary hazards, such as those generated by fire or law enforcement activities occurring simultaneously with ongoing construction or utility operations, can pose serious risks to all involved responders. In addition, the management problems arising from operations involving many different organizations can also result in communications failures, logistical problems, and other conflicts that can directly or indirectly impact responder safety. These only compound the broad range of primary hazards stemming directly from the disaster.

The Response Community Recognizes a Pressing Need for Improved Safety Management

The events of September 11 brought these safety challenges to the fore with an urgency that the emergency response community, and the nation, had not known before. As one of many initiatives that took place in the disaster’s aftermath, the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH) joined with the Science and Technology Policy Institute (S&TPI), formerly managed by the RAND Corporation, to organize a conference in New York City on protecting emergency workers during responses to conventional and biological terrorist attacks [Jackson et al. 2002]. During the discussions, participants frequently expressed deep concern over safety management practices during major crises in general. The research presented in this report is a direct outgrowth of that concern.

In the following pages, we offer recommendations that response organizations can put in place at both the functional and organizational levels to improve safety management in future response operations. In accordance with an all-hazards perspective, we consider the full range of natural and manmade disasters to ensure that the approach we suggest is flexible and comprehensive.

Tomorrow’s Success Depends on Today’s Preparations

The emotionally charged, chaotic environment in the immediate aftermath of a major disaster is not the time to start working on procedures or guidelines to improve responder safety. Strategic planning and management well before the event, along with standardized systems and procedures, are key. Preparedness is the crux of effectiveness.

The distinctive characteristics of major disasters make the case for preparedness especially strong. The multiple hazards inherent in situations of this magnitude call for a flexibility from the response community that can only come through preplanning. That major disasters take so many different forms underscores this point. The response community will inevitably be called upon to carry out substantially different activities—that pose highly varied hazards—as different crises arise. Effective safety management requires having the capabilities and resources in place to deal with this variety.

In addition, because major disasters are rare and the safety risks responders face may be unprecedented, response organizations get little to no practice managing them. In this context, scenario-based planning and training assume added value. Similarly, it is also important to build safety management practices that can meet the needs of disasters into organizations’ standard operating procedures to the extent possible. While use of safety management practices during smaller-scale events will never be directly analogous to applying them in disasters, the experience will nonetheless make it more likely they can be effectively applied when they are needed most. Although no disaster situation is entirely predictable, the more prepared safety managers are to deal with expected hazards, the more attention and energy they will be able to devote to handling unanticipated issues as they arise.

Finally, the fact that major disasters demand a multiagency response operation makes a common understanding of the needs of different organizations—and the parts different response organizations can play in safety management—a precondition for successfully protecting responders. The recommendations we present in this report focus on the changes organizations can begin making today—both individually and collaboratively—to lay the groundwork for better serving responders’ safety needs and managing multiagency safety efforts in the future.

Organization of the Report

Chapter Two describes study methodology. Chapter Three explains disaster management and safety within disaster management systems. Chapters Four to Six discuss the study’s functional safety management recommendations in detail, organized according to the decisionmaking cycle described above. Chapter Seven presents the central organizational finding of the study—that providing effective safety management during major disaster response requires an integrated, multiagency and multiorganizational approach. Chapter Eight discusses preparedness and presents suggestions for the way forward. Appendixes A and B include a list of the interviewees and the workshop participants, as well as the workshop agenda.

¹ For a comprehensive list of potential disasters, see NFPA, 2000b.

² All citations of “Study Interviews” are to not-for-attribution interviews held with members of the response community between November 2002 and March 2003.

³ See Auf der Heide, 1989, p. 34, for further discussion.

⁴ Throughout the text, we adopt the term “multiagency” to describe disaster response operations. This term is intended to convey the involvement of not just many government agencies but nongovernmental and private organizations as well.

⁵ Operating outside of the established command or management structure, generally termed “freelancing,” is widely criticized in the responder community.

⁶ See NFPA, 2000a, for a more detailed discussion of risk management.

⁷ Command of any incident “is essentially about information: getting it, judging its value, processing it into useful form, acting on it, and sharing it with others, so it percolates throughout the whole command structure” [Smitherman 2000]. This statement applies equally to safety management specifically and forms the basis of our model.

⁸ This type of basic model is similar to many other decisionmaking models in the safety [NFPA 2000a], military [Rielage 2001], and other contexts.

⁹ It should be noted that the safety management process described here focuses on the activities of response safety managers during response operations. Although the cyclic nature of the safety management process shown above does point out that safety efforts must be constantly evaluated during an incident, there is also a learning process that must occur after an incident is concluded to improve preparedness for future incidents.

Summary